Artist Rose B. Simpson Transforms Classic Cars While Healing Herself

Posted on by

By Noma Faingold  (Updated September 10, 2025)

Artist Rose B. Simpson is more than a little preoccupied with vessels. She views pottery, cars, her figurative sculptures, the womb and clay, a material she most often uses in her creations, as vessels.

Courtesy of Rose B. Simpson

“I think in clay. Clay was the earth that grew our food, was the house we lived in, was the pottery we ate out of and prayed with,” Simpson told a de Young Museum audience at a very personal lecture she delivered earlier this year. “My relationship to clay is ancestral and it has a deep genetic memory. It’s like a family member for us.” Continue reading →

Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Painter & Poet for All Generations

Posted on by

By Noma Faingold                 (August 1, 2025)

“I never wanted to be a poet. It chose me. I didn’t choose it. One becomes a poet almost against one’s will, certainly against one’s better judgement. I wanted to be a painter, but from the age of 10, these damn poems kept coming. Perhaps one of these days they will leave me alone and I can get back to painting.”

           – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet laureate, publisher, activist, playwright, novelist and painter

The poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his San Francisco studio. (Photo courtesy of Brian Flaherty for The New York Times)

Calling someone an “icon” is annoyingly overused these days. However, when it comes to the late multi-hyphenate Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021), the moniker is appropriate, especially in San Francisco, where he thrived artistically and socially since his arrival in 1951. Continue reading →

Isaac Julien Dreams A World

Posted on by

By Noma Faingold (April 16, 2025)

Watching the 28-minute, 10-screen film/art installation, “Lessons of the Hour,” by British artist/filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien, isn’t as overwhelming as one might think. In fact, the flood of images, sounds and words, dedicated to the life of writer, orator, philosopher, and social justice activist Fredrick Douglass (1818-1895), a former slave, allows the viewer to absorb and interpret the immersive experience in their own way.

Continue reading →

Wrestling the Angel: Two Bay Area filmmakers compose an intimate portrait of a California artist at crossroads

Posted on by

By Farwa Ali          (January 30, 2025)

Graceful veined hands turn the seashell over a few times in reverent contemplation. A few moments later artist Ann Arnold tosses the seashell back into the rippling cerulean waves lapping against the shore of San Francisco’s Baker Beach. It has completed its journey, traveling from the ocean into Arnold’s life; where she has acknowledged its value, captured its luminous existence in her painting, and respectfully returned it to the ocean from whence it emerged. Wrestling The Angel – an Artist’s Passage, does more than capture Arnold’s artistic journey.

Continue reading →

The Secrets of Tamara de Łempicka

Posted on by

An Interview with Director Julie Rubio

by Geneva Anderson

Tamara de Łempicka, the Russian-born 20th century painter known for her cosmopolitan Art Deco portraits and arresting nudes, is front and center in the Bay Area with two major Bay Area venues showcasing her: the Mill Valley Film Festival and the de Young Museum.

Orinda filmmaker Julie Rubio’s years-in-the-making documentary, “The True Story of Tamara de Łempicka & The Art of Survival,” had its world premiere at the 47th MVFF with two sold out screenings and more to come. Simultaneously the de Young Museum opened “Tamara de Łempicka,” the first major museum retrospective of the artist in the U.S. It runs through February 9, 2025.  (Details at the end of the article.)

Director Julie Rubio and Tamara de Łempicka

Continue reading →

All The Beauty and Bloodshed

Posted on by

By C.J. Hirschfield

(March 10, 2023)

The documentary feature All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is actually three movies in one. Directed by 2015 Academy Award winner Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), the film explores the art, life, and political activism of internationally renowned artist Nan Goldin, whose story could not be more compelling. Through her photos, slideshows, interviews and video footage, we get a real sense of what inspired both her art and her activism.

Continue reading →

Gratitude Revealed : Repurposed—With Purpose

Posted on by

By C.J. Hirschfield

September 16, 2022

Gratitude and mindfulness are the subject of countless books right now, with credible medical studies showing that cultivating these practices can actually improve both physical and mental health.

So it’s understandable that award-winning director, cinematographer and producer Louie Schwartzberg has chosen the title “Gratitude Revealed” for his visually stunning and thought provoking new documentary. It could also have been titled “Joy,” or “Celebrating Life,” or even “Sharing my Forty Years of Capturing Beautiful and Meaningful Images.”

Continue reading →

Gravity Spells Returns- “Embrace the Vortex”

Posted on by

By Brian Darr

May 19, 2022

In 2014 John Davis produced a double-album entitled Gravity Spells: Bay Area New Music and Expanded Cinema Art, which presented sound recordings made by himself as well as Maggi Payne, Tashi Wada, Ashley Beloun and Ben Bracken, paired with accompanying DVDs featuring work by local moving image artists Lawrence Jordan, Craig Baldwin, Paul Clipson and Kerry Laitala. The release was accompanied by four weekend performances at the Kala Art institute in Berkeley, and the discs quickly sold out.

Now nearly eight years later there’s a sequel release, Gravity Spells II involving an entirely new slate of Bay Area sound artists and filmmakers. This time around the performances celebrating the release will all be held  May 19-22  at venerable Mission District venue The Lab. Only the artists know quite what to expect, but they’re sure to present a unique live cinema experiences.

Continue reading →

FELLINI 100 : A Celebration in Images, Words and Music

Posted on by

by Gary Meyer

“Why don’t you make films in color?” Federico Fellini was asked shortly after his 1963 black and white hit 8 ½.  He explained that it was not his right to determine for the audience the exact color of, say, a blade of grass or the blue in the sky. I was a teenager with a passionate interest in all kinds of movies, especially the exotic foreign films playing at theaters like Mel Novikoff’s Surf Theatre, Pauline Kael and Ed Landsburg’s Studio & Guild Cinemas and at the San Francisco International Film Festival— this intriguing answer that made sense to me until his next feature came out where he more than broke his rule. Juliet of the Spirits was so overwhelming in its use of color one might have thought it was soon to be banned and he needed to splash every tint and tone across the screen while he could. I loved it in 1965 and can’t wait to see it again on the big screen as part of the Fellini 100 celebration through May 14, 2022 at BAMPFA.

Screen Shot 2020-03-09 at 10.15.54 AM.png

Continue reading →